The number of trees on Earth has almost halved due to a bunch of weird, hairless apes – oh yeah, us.

There are more than three trillion trees worldwide – a lot, in layman’s terms – but 15 billion a year are being lost, due largely to human beings chopping them down.

Since the start of human civilisation around 11,700 years ago the total number of trees has fallen by around 46%, Yale experts now estimate.

The researchers, including UK experts, collected on-the-ground data for the number of trees in more than 400,000 plots of forest from all continents except Antarctica.

A country-by-country breakdown reveals there are more than three billion trees in the UK, or around 47 for each Briton.

Lead author Thomas Crowther of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, ‘We’ve nearly halved the number of trees on the planet, and we’ve seen the impacts on climate and human health as a result.